


Quiet

by PaleBlueEyes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 221B Ficlet, Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 16:48:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaleBlueEyes/pseuds/PaleBlueEyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John, alone, in Baker Street</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet

There’s a mouse, or mice, somewhere.

John hears them pattering about sometimes in the small hours, when he’s not sleeping. He can tune out the traffic and street noise at that time of the night, when the flat is big and quiet and empty. Whoever came up with ‘quiet as a mouse’ obviously hasn’t spent many nights awake in an old Victorian house listening for a noise, for any noise, hearing the building creak and settle, waiting for the skitter of creatures under the floorboards, between the walls.

It doesn’t sound big enough to be a rat, but perhaps that’s him projecting. For some reason he doesn’t like the idea of rats.

Mice, though, that doesn’t bother him much. He keeps his cereal and teabags and sugar in tins, the rest of the food in the fridge, and considers anything else fair game. Once or twice he thinks he sees faint skritchy teeth-marks in the soap in the bathroom before he lathers it up in the morning, and that almost makes him smile. He imagines a cartoon mouse, tasting something it shouldn’t, and making a disgusted cartoony ‘ick’ face. If the imagined mouse has silver-grey eyes and a dark pelt, well. 

He doesn’t mind the idea of something else alive in the flat, with him. Perhaps he should get a dog.


End file.
